B with flourish (Ꞗ, ꞗ) is the Unicode name for the third letter of the Middle Vietnamese alphabet, sorted between B and C. The B with flourish has a rounded hook that starts halfway up the stem (where the top of the bowl meets the ascender) and curves about 180 degrees counterclockwise, ending below the bottom-left corner. It represents the voiced bilabial fricative , which in modern Vietnamese merged with the voiced labiodental fricative, written as the letter V in the Vietnamese alphabet. (In Middle Vietnamese, V represented the labio-velar approximant .)
Usage
The B with flourish is known principally from the works of Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes, particularly his trilingual dictionary (1651) and bilingual (1658). For example, was written . As with the letter Đ, only the lowercase form ꞗ is seen in these works, even where a capital letter would be expected.
The Vietnamese alphabet was formally described for the first time in the 17th-century text , attributed to a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, possibly Francisco de Pina or Filipe Sibin. This passage about the letter Ꞗ was later incorporated into de Rhodes's :
The passage roughly translates to:
The linguistic interpretation of this description is that the sound was a voiced bilabial fricative, which phoneticians transcribe with the Greek letter beta [β].“The two b’s in the Vietnamese dictionary of Alexandre de Rhodes”. Originally published in Vietnamese translation as: Hai Chữ B, trong cuốn từ điển của A-lếch-xan đơ Rốt. Ngôn Ngữ [Linguistics] 4 (1974). Published in French in 2005 as: Les deux b du Dictionarium d’A. de Rhodes, Cahiers d’Etudes Vietnamiennes 18, 65–68. English translation (available online) to appear in: Haudricourt, André-Georges. Evolution of languages and techniques. (Ed.) Martine Mazaudon, Boyd Michailovsky & Alexis Michaud. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 270). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Although some peculiarities of de Rhodes's orthography persisted into the early 19th century, the B with flourish had by then become V, as seen in the writings of Vietnamese Jesuit Philipphê Bỉnh (Philiphê do Rosario).
Computer support The lowercase B with flourish and a hypothetical uppercase form, unattested in de Rhodes's works, were standardized in June 2014 as part of the Latin Extended-D block of Unicode 7.0.
See also
Vietnamese apex, another distinctive element of de Rhodes's orthography
References
External links Đắc Lộ font for Vietnamese that supports B with flourish